UConn Must Ban Teacher-Student Sex

July 17, 2013|Editorial, The Hartford Courant

UConn has some of the brightest minds in the state. So it should be easy for everyone there to grasp a simple notion: Professors are supposed to teach, not have sex with, students — even if the sex is consensual.

The need for ground rules is obvious. When it comes to relationships between teachers and students, the teachers have all the power, making it impossible to measure consent.

The allegations that UConn music professor Robert Miller may have engaged in inappropriate and illegal activities with undergraduates lends urgency to this issue. The university is investigating an apparently uncorroborated report that Mr. Miller visited freshmen dorms, had sex with students and possibly provided them with drugs.

Officials are also looking into whether employees knew as far back as 2006, but did not report, allegations that Mr. Miller had sex with minor children he met through his work at Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.

There's a lot here to sort out, but one thing is clear: UConn is overdue in forbidding professor-student intimacy.

The university has been working for a year to formulate such a policy. The proposed regulations would ban relationships between faculty and undergraduates; between university employees and any graduate students over whom they have authority; and between university supervisors and their employees.

The governing board plans to vote on the proposals soon. Good for the university, but why it took leaders this long to act on such definitive rules is an open question. Yale University toughened its policy in 2010 to ban any intimate relationships between professors and students. Previously, the ban only extended to professors and any students over whom they had authority.

Connecticut's state college system and the state's community colleges should also join the bandwagon.

The UConn Guidebook for Teaching Assistants "strongly discourages romantic and sexual relationships between faculty and student or between supervisor and employee even when such relationships appear or are believed to be consensual." This policy isn't tough enough. A total ban is really the only reasonable solution.